Human Connectome Project

Chemical Connectome

The NIH awarded this money to a consortium of institutions to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain. The human connectome project will in the near future become an amazing source of publicly available data, so keep an eye on that! Update: The Quarter 1 data release with 68 subjects is online! It includes structural, functional (resting state and task) and diffusion images.

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Mapping The Structural Connectome in Autism. 3inShare Autism and agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) are distinct conditions – the first is behavioral while the second anatomical.

Yet about 40% of people born with AgCC show clear indications of autism. Diffusion tractography is a 3D rendering technique that uses data from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to map out cortical connections.
Synaptic tail-chasing: Will we ever have a human connectome?
The field of artificial intelligence has been set abuzz by a recent plan to create a connectome for a human brain.

To borrow a term from circuit board design, a connectome can be described as a netlist for the brain. Basically, a netlist is a file that contains a description of all the wired connections between components on the board. The actual structure of a netlist is similar to that found in object-oriented programming in that it defines electronic component in terms of “objects” instantiated from classes. Components can then be individually described by overriding values in the class definitions.
Connectome. Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology | Biological:Behavioural genetics · Evolutionary psychology · Neuroanatomy · Neurochemistry · Neuroendocrinology · Neuroscience · Psychoneuroimmunology · Physiological Psychology · Psychopharmacology (Index, Outline) File:White Matter Connections Obtained with MRI Tractography.png.

Connectome. Neuroscientists plan to use a virus that carries DNA from neuron to neuron, combined with DNA sequencing technology, to understand how the brain of the mouse is wired, cell by cell.

The project proposed by Anthony Zador and others at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, however, offers a cheaper and faster way to map neuron-to-neuron conversations happening in the brain and could shed light on disorders including autism or schizophrenia. The effort would be an exciting addition to the burgeoning field of “connectome” projects—research efforts to map the neural connections in the brain—says Amy Bernard, director of Structured Science at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

“Fundamental to understanding any foundation of disease or function is first understanding your parts list: what all the cells are, and how they fit together,” says Bernard. “This strategy is really nice, particularly as the cost of sequencing is going down,” says Bernard.
Software — INCF Neuroinformatics Portal. This page lists Open Source software packages for neuroinformatics that are or were developed in Switzerland.

We would like to build up this list of software packages, so if your group in Switzerland has developed (or part-developed) some Open Source software useful for neuroinformaticians, especially in the field of neural reconstruction, please let us know: ch-node@incf.org Cx3D. A Tutorial in Connectome Analysis: Topological and Spatial Features of Brain Networks. A Tutorial in Connectome Analysis: Topological and Spatial Features of Brain Networks.

The New Neuron Connectome. You know what’s nuts?

That we still don’t know the basics. Forget patch clamping thousands of neurons in vivo during awake behaviour. Simultaneously. In humans. In outer space.
Visualizing the Connectome - Neuroskeptic. Last year, I blogged about a new and very pretty way of displaying the data about the human ‘connectome’ – the wiring between different parts of the brain.

But there are many beautiful ways of visualizing the brain’s connections, as neuroscientists Daniel Margulies and colleagues of Leipzig discuss in a colourful paper showcasing these techniques. Here, for example, are two ways of showing the brain’s white matter tracts, as studied with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI):
Behind the Connectome Commotion. Connectomics is having a moment.

Following on the heels of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics, the latest “omic” to seize the spotlight is generating the kind of buzz that makes other disciplines fluorescent green with envy. As the name suggests, connectomics maps connections—specifically, the ones between the neurons in an animal’s brain or nervous system. The advent of high-throughput, computer-assisted techniques has led to an explosion of connectomic technologies and studies.

Connectome project releases brain data. The Human Connectome Project, a five-year endeavor to link brain connectivity to human behavior, has released a set of high-quality imaging and behavioral data to the scientific community. The project has two major goals: to collect vast amounts of data using advanced brain imaging methods on a large population of healthy adults, and to make the data freely available so that scientists worldwide can make further discoveries about brain circuitry.

The initial data release includes brain imaging scans plus behavioral information -- individual differences in personality, cognitive capabilities, emotional characteristics and perceptual function -- obtained from 68 healthy adult volunteers. Over the next several years, the number of subjects studied will increase steadily to a final target of 1,200. The initial release is an important milestone because the new data have much higher resolution in space and time than data obtained by conventional brain scans.

Further information:
Life Science Technologies: This Is Your Brain: Mapping the Connectome. It's been 20 years since Francis Crick and Edward Jones, in the midst of the so-called Decade of the Brain, lamented science's lack of even a basic understanding of human neuroanatomy. "Clearly what is needed for a modern human brain anatomy is the introduction of some radically new techniques," the pair wrote in 1993. Clearly, researchers were listening. Today, they are using novel technologies and automation to map neural circuitry with unparalleled resolution and completeness.
Connectome News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9.

The brain: with all its cells and their connections. Scientists succeed in the complete reconstruction of a piece of retina August 07, 2013 Decoding the essence of being – understanding the brain and all its connections, that is Connectomics. Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Medical Research in Heidelberg, of Neurobiology in Martinsried near Munich, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) now made an important step in this direction: After analyzing data for four years, aided by about 200 undergraduate students, the scientists created a precise diagram of all nerve cells and their connections in a piece of mouse retina. Although representing only a small fraction of the brain, this diagram already revealed a new cell type and circuit motifs that may help to understand the reactions of certain retinal cells.
Sequencing the Connectome. Connectivity determines the function of neural circuits. Historically, circuit mapping has usually been viewed as a problem of microscopy, but no current method can achieve high-throughput mapping of entire circuits with single neuron precision.

Here we describe a novel approach to determining connectivity. We propose BOINC (“barcoding of individual neuronal connections”), a method for converting the problem of connectivity into a form that can be read out by high-throughput DNA sequencing. The appeal of using sequencing is that its scale—sequencing billions of nucleotides per day is now routine—is a natural match to the complexity of neural circuits.

The project was launched in July 2009[1] as the first of three Grand Challenges of the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.[2] On September 15, 2010, the NIH announced that it would award two grants: $30 million over five years to a consortium led by Washington University in Saint Louis and the University of Minnesota, and $8.5 million over three years to a consortium led by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California Los Angeles.[3]
Connectome. White matter tracts within a human brain, as visualized by MRItractography.
Diffusions-Tensor-Bildgebung. Die Diffusions-Bildgebung entstand in den 1980er Jahren.